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Adobe was called in to be a last minute sponsor of MuraCON. Over (70) ColdFusion and Web Developers attended a 2 day conference at Drexel University campus in Sacramento. Nice venue right by the river and down the street from the California capital building. The MuraCon organizers assured me that they wanted to start small with this event. In fact, they weren’t even sure anybody would come! Boy, were they surprised when their conference sold out a month prior to the conference; and, they had a decent size waiting list too.

Adobe Table @MuraCON 2011

I was helping out Josh Adams (@jladams97) our Sales Engineer for ColdFusion. Josh was speaking at the event and needed help at the Adobe table. And as it turned out, there were several Adobe User Group Managers and their members there. The community aspect was great, but what is this Mura stuff? They were at MAX, but I’d never heard of them.

WHAT is MURA?

Mura Guys Delivering the Keynote

Mura is a CFML based Content Management System (CMS) that was created by Blue River Interactive Group, a full-service interactive agency based in Sacramento, California.

Blue River was founded by 3 guys who played in Sacramento area rock bands. They wanted to find a simpler way to update their band websites. So one thing led to another and they developed a flexible web based content management system. They’re young, agile, and they have got some great clients.

Mura is discovering that they are the verge of creating a new community of CFML developers and designers.

Getting A Community Started:

I was asked by one of the founders (“Malcom”) this question: ” When does a software company know when to support a User Group Community? “

Awesome question! I replied: ” Hmm, you’ve held your first user conference; and, it sold out a month ago….Seems like you already have a community! No time like the present to start engaging them! ”

I also added a couple of things:

Continue the dialogue with your users; plan for MuraCON 2012.

Identify influencers who know your technology well, and then invite them to meet Mura staff offsite.

Discuss with your influencers, how they might get involved in forming meetups and speaking about your technology as “outside evangelists”. (They key thing is they have to feel so passionate about your technology that they will do this evangelizing on their own….they can’t be paid or else they lose their street credibility)

Then start thinking about how Mura might engage and recognize them publically. Community Spotlight? A Speaker session @MuraCon2012? Perhaps then, set up a User Groups or a “Champions” program…..centered around these influencers. Things will build from there.

Next Mura will need to think about hiring a Community Coordinator/Manager to help them with event planning, social media outreach, and other engagement opportunities.

Here’s a video below of Jono talking about the rise of communities in corporations/foundations.

The Software Giveaways! + the Swag

We gave away several copies of Flash Builder Premium 4.5 which comes bundled with ColdFusion Builder 2. There were also developer t-shirts and some assorted swag. In talking to a couple of the winners, they had lots of ideas on creating ColdFusion Builder extensions; and some even had an interest in creating Mobile Applications with FlashBuilder 4.5. There was one developer who works for a military organization who wanted to create an Android App and reader device for Java Card ID’s to access their internal intranet. Sounded interesting! All in All, there were a lot of happy CF developers.

Adobe User Groups @MuraCON

Met a couple of Adobe User Group Managers and members at MuraCON:

MuraCON Attendees

Scott Sloan aka “rubbergumball” will be synching-up with Sean Corfield to be the new leader of Bay Area ColdFusion User Grouphttp://www.meetup.com/bacfug which meets at the Adobe building in San Francisco. Thanks Scott for stepping up and helping BACFUG to remain officially in the Adobe User Group program.

Sean Walsh from Inland Empire CFUG http://www.iecfug.com — I had a long conversation with Sean, we naturally talked about doing a joint developer event in Southern California amongst several So. California Adobe User Groups.